Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks by Ken Jennings Read Free Book Online

Island’ “—where the Bounty mutineers wound up—“ ‘and get to know the people.’ Well, last year I bought a house there.”
    When Bill was seventy, he celebrated by buying a Harley and putting 65,000 miles on it, crisscrossing the continent. His plan is to travel until he’s 110—“When you rest, you rest !” he says, implying with grim emphasis that the second “rest” is of the “rest in peace” variety—but his eyesight, failing from glaucoma and macular degeneration, is starting to slow him down. He’s philosophical, though. “What will be, will be, but I’ll muddle through. I’m not going to worry about it. If it happens, it happens.” He grins and elbows me, winking one clouded eye. “Like going out on a date, right?”
    Klaus Billep, the chairman, is taking care of some club business at the front of the room. (“Hold the microphone closer to your mouth!” one hard-of-hearing oldster in the back exhorts him.) The award for traveling the farthest to get to today’s luncheon is given to a band of hardy club members who have just returned from Wake Island. This tiny coral atoll between Hawaii and Guam is a heavily guarded U.S. missile site, and the military clearances involved in planning a visit make it one of the hardest-to-reach places in the world. In fact, of the 141 visitors who made the trip, five were TCC members crossing offthe very last item on their checklist of destinations. Excited gasps and a spontaneous ovation rise from the room.
    Klaus also gives honorable mention to “a gentleman eighty-six years young who drives all the way from Fresno every year.” Rod Ritchie, sitting on the other side of me, raises his hands high above his head to greet the applause. “Still among the living!” he crows.
    “Age is in your mind,” Rod tells me. “When you’re my age, you realize that most of your friends and colleagues are dead. And I didn’t want the trailer behind my hearse to be filled with money; I wanted to spend it! So I started traveling.” A friend told him about the TCC, and they started comparing country counts. “That was like a disease he gave me,” he chuckles ruefully.
    There certainly does seem to be something addictive about the disease of country collecting—some practitioners call themselves “country baggers,” as if entire nations were elusive prey to be stalked and mounted like gazelles. This table is full of men pushing eighty and ninety, but they’re eagerly sharing their latest stories of adventure and peril. Bill took an Amazon trip from Cuzco, Peru, to Manaus, Brazil, through anaconda-infested swamps that are the heart of the South American cocaine trade. Rod was trapped in Fiji during the 2000 coup. “Aw, the problem was in Suva,” he says dismissively. “I was way over in Nadi on the other side of the island.” And still the road calls: Bill wants to see Attu, at the tip of Alaska’s Aleutian islands, the westernmost point of the United States. * Ninety-seven-year-old Alfred Giese, the oldest Traveler present, will be going around the world on the Queen Mary next month. There’s a reason why we call the travel bug “wander lust, ” not “wanderwhim” or “wanderhobby.” It’s an urgent, passionate thing.
    These wanderers seek each other out because no one else understands them or wants to see their vacation slides. “We’ve all got this crazy obsession,” says Christopher Hudson, the English-born book publisher for New York’s Museum of Modern Art who is currently serving as TCC president. “I find that when I talk to my other friendsabout travel, either their eyes glaze over or they think, ‘Oh God, why’s this guy dropping all these names?’”
    The club also provides its members what Chris calls “a good source of information for going to all of these obscure places.” The TCC publishes, at last count, 483 different “info files” on far-flung destinations containing the kind of travel advice you won’t get from